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Boeing 737

Ever wonder how Boeing produces over FORTY 737 airplanes a month? A train arrives with the main body in the morning. They turn them out about one every 18 hours and every part is supplied by the lowest cost supplier. This 3 ? minute video is fascinating.

The last 16 years of my career at Boeing was in the Renton Plant where the 737 was manufactured.

I was the Tool Engineering project manager for two large ($100M and $250M) projects that allowed them to reach the rate they are currently at. I have to admit, I loved my job there and almost 2 years later I still miss it and still dream about it at times.

And here are a couple pictures from the other project I was on. This is the wing HBL (Horizontal Build Line) assembly. This is the first time that any modern manufacturer had built a wing in the airplane orientation. Up to this point they had been built with the trailing edge or rear spar horizontal with the ground.

I got a couple US Patents for some of the things we came up with to pull this project off.

So it's a ...- kit? Like a FFR Cobra? ;-)
18 hour assembly time sounds like the same as in car manufacturing!

In some ways you are not far off.

We received a complete fuselage from Wichita and it comes in and is stuffed with all the interior components. Then it is moved to the wing/body join position. The wings are installed and the landing gear. It's lowered on to the factory floor and rolled to the next position. It is then loaded onto a automated and powered AGV that moves it down the rest of the line until the end where it's lowered and rolled out of the factory.

It's pretty impressive considering they had troubles reaching a rate of 21 a month with the old manufacturing processes.

Cool videos. How long is that building where they're moving down the line?

Is the painting part of that 18 hours? It seems like paint alone would take longer than that for masking, painting, drying, remasking, etc.

That's a yes and no answer Al.

There are 10's of thousands of manhours in the building of the airplane. However what is happening is that you have a plane rolling out the factory doors every 18 hours off of two assembly lines.

Let me see if I can explain it a little better. For this discussion lets assume that you have 10 positions in the final assembly line. Every plane sits in a single position for 36 hours. If you have 10 people working a position, then you have 225 manhours expended in that position. So the line moves every 36 hours through those 10 positions and there is a total of 2250 manhours expended in the final assembly line. With two lines one is moving every 18 hours. And there are a number of airplanes in process at any one time so it's not like a fuselage rolls in the front door on hour 1 and 18 hours later it rolls out the back door. Does that make sense?

While I did do some things over in final assembly, most of my time was spent in the wings building. So going by memory I believe the final assembly building was in the 1000 to 1100 foot long area.